The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East

Introduction: Agency of History

The Symbolic Potential of the Transnational Mosque

Martyrs’ Square in central Beirut is synonymous with the upheavals and wars that have defined Lebanon in particular, and the Middle East in general, over the past one hundred years. Since its renaming in the early years of the twentieth century, the square has been the backdrop to major changes taking place in Beirut, from decolonialization to civil war. The location of the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque is thus not accidental (fig. I.1). The monumental mosque, with its vast domes and piercing minarets, reflects the intriguing aesthetic and political negotiations that went into its design and patronage. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia provided the funds, and the late prime minister, Rafic Hariri, the governmental impetus; the architect Azmi Fakhouri designed the building with a keen interest in historic preservation and with Istanbul and Cairo on his mind. Together, national and individual agendas coalesced to create a design that is singular, if not unique. The mosque has particular significance to the Lebanese, yet its form is familiar to any tourist who has visited Sharjah, Tokyo, Berlin, or Istanbul in the past decade. Repetitions of form and echoes of the past conjure a history that is at once mutable and ever-present.

FIGURE I.1. Muhammad al-Amin Mosque, Beirut, completed in 2008. Architect, Azmi Fakhouri. Photograph by the author.

The al-Amin Mosque has a timeless quality, even as it represents the particularities of recent Lebanese history. Before coming to the mosque, visitors stop at the nearby memorial to Hariri, who was assassinated in 2005, three years before the completion of his beloved project (see fig. 2.11). The entrance of the al-Amin Mosque is through tall wooden doors that allow in bright light and a cool breeze floating off the Mediterranean Sea. Two men sit at the threshold engaged in conversation, occasionally making sure that the visitors are properly dressed and appropriately respectful. The soaring domes, colored in muted reds and gold, look like the underside of jellyfish, slowly floating to the top. Outside, the blue domes appear to break the horizon, marking the presence of Sunni Islam in this ancient city. The quiet within the mosque is welcome and strangely unexpected. Mosques are often peaceful spaces, for individual reflection and communal prayer. Yet in the al-Amin Mosque the experiences are heightened, contrasting sharply with the charged atmosphere outside its tall porticoes and doors. The mosque is built on a raised platform connected to the Garden of Forgiveness and overlooking the mausoleum of the mosque’s patron, Hariri. To enter the mosque one must cross a busy motorway and large parking lot, a wasteland devastated in the years of unrest that divided Beirut. Nearby, older sanctuaries welcome devotees and tourists; churches dedicated to St. George and St. Elias; Roman baths; and a medieval mosque containing hair believed to have belonged to the Prophet Muhammad. The monuments are connected by the Garden of Forgiveness and the newest haute couture stores marking the Central Business District (CBD). The Ottoman and Mamluk references of the al-Amin Mosque point to a history that is in the process of transformation. It is an insecure history, contested and fragmentary, its unity a mask, like the yellow stone cladding behind which steel girders form the true structure of the building. Thus, while the form of the building refers to the distant past and appears to move beyond geographical and temporal boundaries, the goal of this resurrected imagery is to create a vision for a future defined by religious ideology.

The whole earth is a mosque is a common saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. Regardless of where Muslims may find themselves, the main requisites to prayer are the ritual ablution and knowledge of the direction toward the Ka ba in Mecca. Nonetheless, mosques are built as physical manifestations of Islam and continue to serve the needs of diverse communities. In recent decades, mosques have sometimes come to be associated with violence and regarded as sites from which extremist ideologies are disseminated. Two examples come immediately to mind: The Grand Mosque in Mecca was seized in 1979 by a group of dissidents who claimed the apocalyptic arrival of the Mahdi, the divine guide who is believed to inaugurate the Day of Judgment. And in the summer of 2007, the Red Mosque in Islamabad was the scene of a catastrophic showdown between the Pakistani army and the students of the adjacent Jami a Hafsa Madrasa. In both cases, the mosques, one ancient and the other modern, have become synonymous with a resurgent, if not homogeneous, vision of militant Islam. They also demonstrate the manner in which the concept of historical time was mutated in ways that echoed the fragmented identities and loyalties of those involved in these confrontations—Saudi dissidents in the case of the Grand Mosque, militant students in the case of the Red Mosque.

More recently, mosques have been co-opted by groups such as Da ish (al-Dawlā al-Islāmīyya fī l Irāq wā al-Shām), or ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), who appropriate and simultaneously obliterate them. While the focus of this book is on the construction of mosques in the contemporary Middle East, the broader context is important to consider. The book’s backdrop thus is the destruction of Shi i and Sufi shrines, Ahmadi and Kurdish mosques, Bahā’ī temples, and Christian churches. The construction of an Islamic historical consciousness is also shadowed by the erasure of a pre-Islamic past, of the neo-Assyrian and Gandharan empires, of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Judaism.¹

Events such as those in Mecca and Islamabad seem to suggest an understanding of time as a continuum on a Möbius strip that circles back into itself, not as a linear progression. In such an ideation, the Qur an is used as a manual of contemporary law and the end of time strangely echoes the mythical beginnings of Islamic history. Ancient practices and institutions are called on to create a new world order through the discourse of religious revivalism enabled by new technologies. Millennialism provided fodder not just for Christians marking the year 2000, but also for several other religious groups that built on the ethos of renewal and change to rethink their own religious identities. Architecture serves as the physical embodiment of this mobility of meaning; the mosque is thus simultaneously a memorial to the past and an aspiration toward what is to come. Additionally, its design and patronage reveal the multiple transnational agents involved, from foreign governments to local associations with international ties.

This book aims to analyze the role of mosques in the construction of Muslim identity through the lens of their political, religious, and architectural history. The emphasis on historical style permeates almost all of the transnational, state-sponsored mosques discussed here. This stylistic accent is not simply an attribute of postmodernity or a cynical reference to the past. Instead, the need to monumentalize different periods of Islamic history capitalizes on the zeitgeist of contemporary Islam, in which backward glances appear to provide direction and serve as inspiration for communities and governments seeking a new vision for the future. The historicism comes at the heels of a revivalist moment in both Islamic and world history, witnessed in the rise of fundamentalist movements from Asia to the Americas, from Christian communities to Hindu ones. It also gains legitimacy through global trends in postmodern architecture, which has revitalized classicism as an antidote to early twentieth-century modernist attitudes toward design and aesthetics.

Transnational mosques, as conceptualized in this study, are buildings built through government sponsorship, both in the home country and abroad, whose architectural design traverses geographic and temporal distances. They are thus state mosques as well as ambassadorial gifts, monumentalizing the political ambitions of their patrons. Their audience is the local user as well as the international community, for whom they represent a particular vision of global Islam. The centers from which this study emanates are located in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, yet the architectural examples implicate countries far removed from their borders and as different as Germany and Pakistan.

With an interdisciplinary approach utilizing fieldwork, architectural and photographic documentation, and interviews with architects and patrons, this study interrogates the multiple agents and diverse agendas behind the construction of transnational mosques. Questions of intentionality and agency are crucial to understanding the motivations behind both patronage and historical reference. For this reason I focus on three perspectives—that of the commissioning state, the architect, and the public for whom the mosque is intended. While all angles are not always easily represented or made apparent, they are nonetheless central to this analysis. Our understanding of the practice of architecture is thus transformed through a closer look at political contexts, historical details, and the complex biographies of patrons and designers. Architecture is considered here as an archeology of forms and symbols and an agent in the construction of Islamic identity.

Transnational mosques provide insights into the diverse practices and beliefs of modern Islam and the nature of devotion in the twenty-first century. Their patronage, design, and production serve as important resources for understanding the role of architecture in creating public space as well as disseminating religious ideology. The networks within which contemporary mosques exist are more complex than ever before and need to be studied within their political and historical contexts. Their symbolic meanings and formal relationships, however unique and specific to the Muslim context, also connect them to modern architecture from other religious traditions. Contemporary mosques thus mark the underlying connections, sometimes harmonious and sometimes in conflict, within the modern Middle East in particular, but also the world at large.

In the twentieth century, architectural production in the Middle East, as elsewhere in the developing world, was predicated on emulation and engagement with Western forms of modernism, in which emphasis was laid on projects that furthered the image of statehood, such as educational and governmental buildings. Seen as derivative of movements in Europe and the United States, this architecture was often considered by scholars to be neither indigenous nor international, belonging neither to Islamic cultural history nor to the history of global modernism. Even less attention has been paid to modern religious architecture, such as mosques, shrines, and community centers, which are dismissed as catering to popular taste and undeserving of intellectual engagement. It is necessary to question these presumptions by studying the nationalist roots of early twentieth-century architecture, as well as the impact of international modernism on the built environment of the Middle East.² It is also important to investigate the manner in which such institutions may be viewed as forms of political and social agency.

I assert the heterogeneity of Muslim identity by focusing on distinct mosques and by revealing the complex negotiations that take place within and between nations and communities of belief. Recent scholarship has laid important groundwork for understanding the networks through which these negotiations are implemented.³ Architectural practice at the turn of the twenty-first century, too, is one of interconnections, predicated on the itinerancy of architects and the global networks of corporate construction firms. Identities and nationalities can provide access, as is the case of the young Lebanese-American-French architect Michel Abboud, whose practice is located in New York, Beirut, and Mexico City and who was commissioned in 2010 to design the Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque in lower Manhattan.⁴ Similarly, the London-based Halcrow Group oversaw the construction of the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi. The ability for individuals as well as corporations to move beyond geographic borders and even religious ones speaks to the transnational nature of contemporary architectural culture and the mobility provided by modern technology.

The regional interconnectedness of modern architecture in the Middle East is a subject that has not received the attention it deserves. Most studies focus either on a specific nation or generalize the motivations for all Muslim communities. The study of modern mosques often falls into the latter category and, despite attempts at exhibiting diversity, results in essentialist readings of a pan-Islamic identity. The first comprehensive examination of modern mosques was published in 1997 and divides the subject into categories such as governmental and individual patronage, community and commercial institutions, and sites in Europe and the United States. One of the categories relevant to this study is that of the state mosque, which the authors Renata Holod and Hasan Uddin Khan define as a building initiated by the central government and paid for by public funds. It is inevitably conceptualized by a committee with an insistence upon a clearly recognizable image, that is to say explicit in terms of regional, modernist and Islamic references.⁵ This book builds on the foundations laid by that earlier scholarship by focusing on transnational mosques built within and beyond state borders.

In the past forty years, religious identity has come to play an increasingly central role in public discourse. This is evident in the Islamic Republics of Iran and Pakistan, but also throughout the Middle East and South Asia, where Islam is a galvanizing form of sociopolitical expression. New patrons promoting religious ideology as a source of political agency have sponsored wholesale reinterpretations of traditional building types. Similarly, greater emphasis has been laid on institutions that represent and augment Islam, such as mosques, madrasas, and community centers. Contemporary mosques employ tradition as a starting point for their design, but their styles move beyond the simple repetition of form. Not only are older motifs reinterpreted, but the very functions of a mosque are altered in order to respond to social change. A cogent example is the Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara (plate 5), a massive structure with a parking garage and shopping mall in its lower levels, which looks strikingly like Ottoman mosques built in previous centuries. However, here the patron was not a sultan but the populist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi), with its appeal to a broad segment of Turkish society.

Architecture emerges as the repository of historical consciousness, serving as it does to both monumentalize belief and situate it within particular geographic and ideological sites. Although a building like the Kocatepe Mosque may have a singular physical location, it will arguably reference places far removed from Ankara and moments remarkably distant from its date of construction. This mobility marks contemporary architectural practice and subverts ideas of regionalism and nationalist styles that have pervaded the discourse on architecture in the twentieth century. Mosque architecture, in particular, also calls into question the common representation of Islam as a monolithic identity, shared across centuries and continents. Instead, examples of contemporary mosques require contextualization, even as they highlight the transregional and transhistorical trends that define architecture and religion today.

Trans- is here used as a prefix connoting the act of moving across and beyond—simultaneously—the nation and an ahistorical conception of time. It is meant to evoke a complex, porous set of connections that question geographical and statist boundaries while acknowledging their centrality in issues of contemporary religion and political ideology. Scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds have addressed the issue of transnational connections in great depth, and their work has served as an important foundation for this book. Arjun Appadurai, for example, has written about the nature of modernity as manifested in synchronous locations in the world and its repercussions on economic and cultural institutions.⁶ In Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places, Ulf Hannerz contemplates the multiple sites from which cosmopolitan culture can be viewed and questions the idea of nationalism at the turn of the millennium.⁷ Saskia Sassen has argued for understanding such dynamic processes within the framework of both mobility and fixity.⁸ The mobilities paradigm is a term coined by Mimi Sheller and John Urry to describe the movement of ideas, people, and art in a manner that is best understood as a series of fluid interdependencies, not as separate phenomena.⁹ Another way of describing this expanded arena is to think of global fields of operations as participating in a porous public sphere, a concept used by Thomas Olesen to describe the circulation of images in the context of a Danish newspaper’s publication of controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. The rapid circulation and distribution of the images was evidence that the national and transnational are not dialectically opposed, but intimately connected through the availability and mobility of media. Public spheres undergo important transformations in the process of globalization, but this should not lead us to conclude that they cease to be national. . . . [Indeed,] this public sphere is increasingly porous. That is to say, we live in porous publics intimately connected with the world around us.¹⁰ Whether one refers to the process as globalization or transnational mobility, new technologies have transformed the conception of one’s place in the world and how it may be represented and memorialized.

Cartoons and images blur national and even linguistic boundaries; similarly, architectural form, from mosques to shopping malls, participates in the circulation of ideas and commodities that depend on global networks of communication and travel.¹¹ Recent studies on architecture in the Middle East have focused on the nationalist goals of twentieth-century governments and their attempts at appropriating broader international trends.¹² Less attention has been paid to the manner in which regional and transnational movements may have influenced particular choices in architectural design and production. We can address this question by understanding the significance of the forms of iconic mosques and the patronage networks that help sustain and disseminate them.

As current events in the Middle East and North Africa demonstrate, allegiances in the Islamic world are often based on the perception of shared histories of language, ethnicity, and religion. However, the term Middle East, while suggesting a category of affiliations, may better be understood as an umbrella under which diverse histories, politics, and religious identities are gathered. It is useful to think of this seeming territorial designation instead as a geopolitical concept or a virtual space that serves to unite shifting social and political realities.¹³ As Michael Ezekiel Gasper writes, The Middle East belongs to a geographic imaginary that is in part built on the general alignment of contemporary geo-strategic power. Accordingly, it will inextricably accumulate new meaning until some major strategic realignment occurs and the geographical paradigms that have been in place for more than a century give way to something new.¹⁴ Despite the too-simple discourse of globalization as a boundaryless web of correlations, the reality of the early twenty-first century is that identities—such as the Middle East or the Islamic world—continue to dictate how people and their governments define themselves.

Architecture, particularly that of mosques, manifests territorial as well as ideological connections by referencing historical periods and building styles and by enabling the rituals of inhabitation that augment the practice of religion. It may be argued that among the most important issues connecting—and, unfortunately, sometimes dividing—the Middle East is religious identity. While this identity is constructed and disseminated through several national and subnational means, four nations represent important and distinct visions for the future of the larger Muslim community and are taking steps to advancing that agenda. Thus Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates serve as the starting points of this study. Through close analyses of their nationalist projects and their patronage of transnational mosques, valuable insights may be gleaned into not only the region’s political geography, but also its architectural landscape. Through their patronage, the dynamic mobility of form and meaning is made manifest. Rather than suggesting any predetermined flow from one to another, the mosques studied here reveal the unexpected and complex interactions between these nations and global communities of belief.

The Meaning and Significance of the Mosque

The institution of the mosque has changed over the course of the centuries, yet some fundamental aspects have remained the same. The word for mosque, masjid, derives from the Arabic word sajda (prostration), thus defining the mosque as a place of prayer and submission. Given the absence of prescribed liturgy in Islamic worship, the mosque is a less formal space than, say, a Catholic church, where the clerical hierarchies often dictate devotional practice. The Muslim is expected to pray five times a day, but the worship can occur in private and in domestic settings.¹⁵ However, the male members of the Muslim community are meant to pray together on Friday afternoons and on holy days, such as Eid al-Fitr.¹⁶ The only stipulation for prayer is cleanliness, for which reason ablution facilities are always provided near or within the mosque precincts. The ritual purification is symbolized as a spiritual one as well; the threshold of mosques is viewed as entrance into a sacred space, and the mosque a House of God (bayt Allāh). Thus mosques are also places of safety and asylum, and historical records provide several examples of people within them seeking refuge from taxation as well as persecution.¹⁷

Early Islamic history continues to provide important guidelines for contemporary practice. During the lifetime of the prophet, Muhammad, the mosque was a place of gathering, where the newly formed Muslim community would meet and pray together, forge alliances, and make decisions that affected the entire group. Indeed, the first mosque was the house of Muhammad in Medina. The house consisted of an open courtyard around which the private quarters of Muhammad and his wives were arranged, along with a portico where his companions would gather (they came to be known as the ṣāhib al-ṣafa, or people of the portico).¹⁸ The private and public spaces of the house were separated by curtains and partitions, but it is believed that the women on Muhammad’s family were nonetheless actively involved with the newly formed Muslim community.

One of the walls of Muhammad’s house pronounced the direction to Mecca, or qibla, toward which the Muslims prayed to honor the holy structure built by Abraham, the Ka ba.¹⁹ On the qibla wall of the earliest mosques there was an empty niche or indentation known as the mihrab (fig. I.2). This mark is the only prominent and required architectural feature in a mosque. A second, more ephemeral marker is the adhān, or call to prayer, something akin to church bells marking the time of day. In Muslim countries, the adhān is proclaimed five times a day, calling believers to fulfill their religious obligation. Although the earliest Muslims declared the adhān from the walls or parapets of the mosques, over time a tower was added to the mosque, which served the dual function of an elevated place to call from and also as a physical marker of the mosque itself. Scholars have debated the various functions of the minaret in Islamic societies, interpreting it as a victory stele as well as an urban marker.²⁰ In addition to these architectural features, a minbar (pulpit) is often located next to the mihrab and takes the form of an elevated seat from which the imām (prayer leader) preaches during Friday sermons. Portable objects, such as prayer rugs and lamps, are essential parts of mosques’ furnishings and were often gifted by the pious as acts of charity and benevolence. It is important to note that although diverse traditions of mosque design exist throughout the Muslim world, the only requirement is for the building to mark accurately the direction of the Ka ba and for it to provide enough space for the congregation of believers. For the latter reason, cities historically have had a large open space, or musallā, dedicated to large religious gatherings, such as Friday sermons and Eid prayers.

FIGURE I.2. Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun Mosque, Cairo, 1318–35. Photograph by Kara Hill, 1989. Courtesy of the MIT libraries, Aga Khan Visual Archive.

Mosques are places of prayer as well as socialization: Muslims gather there to affirm their belief and participate in communal rituals of devotion. These functions are not restricted to mosques alone, but are also enacted in other religious establishments such as madrasas and commemorative shrines. Indeed, the latter institution in particular has historically been the site of both elite and popular patronage, visited by women and men, the wealthy and the mendicant. Shrines in the Islamic world vary in terms of their attribution and use; that is, they may be dedicated to a holy figure, such as a Shi i imam or a Sufi shaykh, and may serve a purely commemorative function or be part of a larger social organization. In some religious milieus, the shrine acts as the primary space of devotion, overshadowing the mosque entirely. This is certainly the case in Shi i contexts, where the veneration of the ahl al-bayt, or family of the Prophet Muhammad, is monumentalized in their commemorative shrines. Very often these shrines incorporate prayer spaces within them or are linked to a mosque or nearby musallā. Thus in this book I broaden the definition of the transnational mosque to include these other types of devotional spaces, arguing that ultimately the motivations for their patronage overlap and provide important comparative insights.

The role of the mosque as a communal space remains today among its key features and is recognized in its program and design. The mosque may serve the entire city or a small neighborhood; it may be part of a madrasa or a shrine; it may serve a particular sect or may be dedicated to a particular ethnic group. It may be built on land owned by the government, donated by a benefactor, or on land seized by squatters. The socioeconomic and urban issues raised in this book highlight not only the semantic and ideological effects of mosque construction, but also the impact on the communities served as well as those marginalized through the building process.²¹ Thus, for instance, the state mosques studied here may claim to represent a nation’s history and religious identity; they may also be built on land cleared of minorities or